Property Sold to Benefit Clifton College, Bristol
Duncan Grant
Portrait of Cecil Taylor
Auction Closed
November 26, 03:10 PM GMT
Estimate
30,000 - 50,000 GBP
Lot Details
Description
Duncan Grant
1885 - 1978
Portrait of Cecil Taylor
oil on canvas
unframed: 79 by 82.5cm.; 31¼ by 32½in.
framed: 90 by 93cm.; 35 by 36½in.
Executed circa 1909.
We are grateful to Richard Shone for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.
Sir John Sheppard
George Rylands
Dr. A.N.L. Munby, by whom gifted to Clifton College, Bristol
Cambridge, Arts Council Gallery, Portraits by Duncan Grant, 8 - 29 November 1969, no. 8, with tour to Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle and the University of Hull, Hull
Richard Shone, Bloombsury Portraits, Phaidon, Oxford, 1976, p. 53
The sitter was friendly with Maynard Keynes, Sir John Sheppard, G.H. Luce and others in the Cambridge wing of early Bloomsbury. Sheppard (later Provost of King’s College, Cambridge) was infatuated with Taylor and commissioned this portrait of him from Grant. Sittings took place in Cambridge and the work was finished in a house in Burford, rented by Keynes in August 1909. The portrait was originally owned by Sheppard and finally went to Clifton College, after Taylor’s death. Taylor was a much admired classics teacher at Clifton and the author of several scholarly articles on classical themes. Surprisingly, however, he collected a good number of contemporary paintings, especially in the 1920s.
The present work shows the influence of Whistler but more particularly of Simon Bussy, the French painter married to Grant’s cousin Dorothy Strachey.
Richard Shone
